If you share a household with other people, you know the struggle: someone finishes the last of the olive oil and doesn’t write it down, and two weeks later you’re mid-recipe and out of luck.

Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of approaches. Dedicated apps like Out of Milk seemed promising at first—until they inevitably pivot to a subscription model and become just another $5/month bleeding out of your bank account alongside all the other $5/month apps bleeding out of your bank account. Shared notes worked until they didn’t: multiple dated lists (“Shopping List 2023-04-12”) became a graveyard of old groceries, and a single running list got unwieldy fast.

What finally clicked was Apple Reminders. We have a single shared list that my whole family can access. The key insight is that it functions less like a to-do list and more like an inventory: it contains everything we buy regularly, and items stay on the list permanently. When we run out of something, we uncheck it. When we’ve bought it—or decided we don’t need it—we check it off. At any given moment, the unchecked items are exactly what we need to buy.

When I described this to a friend, he thought about it for a second and said, “So you keep a list of what you have, like an inventory, and note the things that you need to buy?”

Yes, exactly! It took me years of friction to land on something so simple.